: SDF: Anyone whose labor is a commodity?Or anyone who directly produces their own commodity (Basket weavers, small potters)- very rare nowadays, what would have been the Artisan class.
: SDF: So what distinguishes one as a capitalist is that one is "caught up" in the accumulation of capital? Hmmmm, sounds interesting, have to think about it...
Yeah, or putting capital accumulation before living: Marx talks about the Sisyphian task of prmitive accumulation, the anal retentiveness of bourgeois disavowal (if I refuse pleasure now, I can store it up, and have more pleasure later)...
: SDF: Or so we revolutionaries would like to dream. But do you remember that quote I gave awhile back from Craig Calhoun's THE QUESTION OF CLASS STRUGGLE -- Calhoun showed that as capitalism evolved, the working class saw its lot thrown in more and more with reformism, whether this was the best course for it, or not.
Indeed, stuff I'm doing at the moment with Slavoj Zizek's notion of 'the inherent transgression', and the way in which ideology interpollates through disidentifcation (his example is the Holocaust, which was an open secret, 'enjoyed' by the Nazis, but one they caould say 'it wasn't really me, I'm not really like that, I was just following orders'- ideology works to the extent that we feel we're not a part of it- another example being from anthropology, apparently in some tribes when asked 'are you really descended from birds' replied 'no of coruse not, I don't believe that, I'm not daft, though I'm told that people used to beleive it...', etc.). Which ties in with what Marx says in teh manifesto about the 'slave' staying a slave until he canmaintain his identity as slave no more...
: Maybe the utopian dreamers can be found in Brazil, where the aura of Freire still lingers, where there's a PT to work for, where the people are desperate for something new. Have you thought of going there? Know how to speak Portuguese? (I don't.)
Haven't they got a big squatters movement there?
None.
